It Is the Chad Johnson Show

The spark plug of the Cincinnati Bengals promises that this season, all season, it’s Chad time. No more playing it straight for the coach. No more blending in with the team. The most exciting and entertainingly self-aware player in the NFL has definitely, in the words of the man himself, “got my sexy back“

At noon on a Sunday in August, I knock for several minutes on the door of Chad Johnson’s vest-pocket Cincinnati town house until finally he appears, dressed only in a pair of high-tech skintight athletic shorts. “You woke me up,“ he apologizes, then ushers me up a narrow staircase. At the top, he pauses. “What are we doing today?“ He yawns. Even when Johnson is not in motion—even when he’s yawning—he still looks fast. The contours of his lithe physique, 99 percent of which he is indifferently displaying right now, look molten, liquid, like an Oscar statuette’s.

As we seat ourselves on adjacent couches in his living room, I can’t help but notice that the air is chilled to the temperature of a fine champagne. Which is to say, it’s freezing. I’d read somewhere that Johnson, in honor of his uniform number, keeps his thermostat at eighty-five degrees, and I mention this factoid in a plaintive tone. The writer got that wrong, he mutters, and then disappears up another staircase.

Aside from a couple of couches and a plasma TV big as a barn door, Johnson’s living room is only semi-furnished. Things are neatly arranged in several piles on the gray wall-to-wall carpet—his Guitar Hero controller and PlayStation console, his CDs and his DVDs (he’s “into musicals big-time,“ he tells me, notably Chicago). His walls are bare except for four enormous game-action paintings, heavily gold-leafed and gouached, of Chad Johnson. While he’s still upstairs, I take the opportunity to review my notes, but in this unlit room I can hardly read them, and I worry it might convey the wrong impression if I ask a basically naked man to turn on a lamp “so I can see better.“ It’s not too dark, though, to make out the detritus of a pretty excellent night: video-game peripherals balanced on the arm of a couch, assorted feminine bangles piled on the coffee table, a pair of silver strappy high heels discarded on the floor. Apparently, we are not alone in this house. Johnson is, as you might have deduced, happily single, and it seems to me a great tribute to his charm and celebrity that he can get a woman to disrobe in a place so goddamn cold.

Johnson returns. As if none of this is the least bit unusual—the darkness, the cryogenic ambience, the unacknowledged friend upstairs—he drapes himself in the biggest bathrobe I have ever seen and declares, “Let’s rock.“

The only player ever to lead his conference in pass yardage four years running, Chad Johnson is arguably the best wide receiver in the National Football League. No defensive coordinator in his right mind uses fewer than two defenders on him, and the prudent ones use three. Even Champ Bailey, the greatest shutdown cornerback since Deion Sanders, has been burned by the zigzagging, trash-talking Johnson, who reportedly runs a 4.3 forty. Defending him one-on-one is like trying to capture a stir-crazy dragonfly using an espresso cup. “Cornerbacks fear being embarrassed by me,“ Johnson, sprawled on the couch in his magnificent bathrobe, announces into the darkness. “I want that spotlight on me.“

As a narcissist, Johnson is not School of Barry Bonds but of Pee-wee Herman. His is a narcissism that invites rather than alienates, largely because it’s not fueled by pathology in the way that Bonds’s or, say, Terrell Owens’s appears to be. Unlike many limelight-loving athletes, Johnson moves easily between his public and private personae. He doesn’t messily mix them up, like T.O., or furtively compartmentalize them, like Michael Vick. His humor has an artlessness, an unexpected sweetness, that makes him seem at times like a character in a kids’ cartoon.

In 1988, the soon-to-flame-out rookie sensation Ickey Woods invented the modern-day end-zone celebration with the dance known as the Ickey Shuffle. Over the past five years, Chad Johnson has refined these celebrations into a kind of performance art, along the way accumulating some $100,000 in fines. In 2005, he devised and performed a series of hilariously inventive, YouTube-ready touchdown celebrations in which he variously putted the football with a pylon, administered CPR to it, Riverdanced, and pretend-proposed marriage to a cheerleader. When he talks to me about those days, his deadpan expression comes alive with pride and amusement. “Man,“ he says wistfully, “it got to a point where stuff was getting so good that opposing players wanted to know what I was going to do. The head coaches, the referees: What you got for me today?’ Everybody enjoyed it. It was hilarious. How do you get mad at the Riverdance?“ The burden of expectations became such that in one 2005 late-season game, he was vigorously booed when, after scoring a touchdown, he simply handed the football to an official.

But by the following season, he’d sworn off touchdown celebrations altogether, apparently at the request of Marvin Lewis, his head coach, who for three years had been exasperatedly repeating, in one way or another, a widely quoted 2003 remark: “It’s not the Chad Johnson Show!“ Deprived of his right to perform live sketch comedy before stadium audiences of 80,000, Johnson endured a frustrating 2006 that featured a four-game and a six-game touchdown-less streak. There is, he believes, an obvious cause-and effect relationship between his being taken off the air, so to speak, and last year’s slump.

“The way I am,“ he explains, “I should be a bor, I should be a tennis player, I should be a golfer—because those are individual sports. I’m playing a team game, but the way I approach the game, it’s like I’m playing by myself. What?“ He suddenly raises his voice and turns his head toward the staircase. A woman’s voice drifts down to us, barely audible. “You gotta come here!“ he yells. “I’m doing an interview!“ Facing me again, he says, “Coach Lewis loves to tell me, You’re a team leader,’ but I don’t like that role. Other people just go into the game and hope they win. I’m telling you I’m going to. And that means everybody else has to step up, too.“

I ask Johnson how he proposes to follow up his disappointing last season, and he replies that there is only one logical response: celebration reinstatement. “This year is going to be ridiculous,“ he promises. In his eagerness he is practically trembling. “I’ve got all sixteen celebrations planned. I need a touchdown every week. Coach gotta let me have my sexy back.“

As French Lick, Indiana, reveals itself in Larry Bird, so does Miami in Chad Johnson. “What you see on the field,“ Johnson tells me, “is all Miami. My swagger, the way I talk, the way I play. It’s part of your upbringing there. When you’re 4 years old, you’re talking trash on the field. Seriously—it’s an art form down there, dude. What you see on the field is a character. Outside of that, I’m completely different.“

Johnson grew up in Miami, having been left at age 5 in his grandmother’s care by an overwhelmed mother. “Were it not for my grandmother,“ he has said, “I’d be selling drugs, doing time…or dead.“ In 1996, after being expelled from an Oklahoma college for fighting, he came home, looking for trouble. His grandmother promptly sent him back to his mother, in L.A., where one summer day in 1997, he gate-crashed a football practice at Santa Monica College. “I just started running pass routes,“ he says. “I wasn’t signed up or anything. I just showed up out of nowhere.“ At the junior college, he met the man who would change his life: the team’s receivers coach, Charles Collins, who made the 19-year-old belatedly aware that he, Chad Johnson, possessed the raw physical abilities of a superstar.

After a solid first season, Johnson lost a year of eligibility for academic reasons. “I’m very smart, trust me,“ he says, “but I did horrible in school.“ Barred from game action, he worked out with Collins six days a week, learning footwork, release and separation techniques, even how to train. It would become a pattern in Johnson’s life: Given attention, he blossomed. Sometimes, however, craving the attention, he would seemingly forget it wasn’t an end in and of itself.

As a senior transfer, Johnson would lead Oregon State to a national number-five ranking and score a seventy-four-yard TD, the so-called “bomb that broke the Irish,“ in a Fiesta Bowl victory over Notre Dame. Cincinnati selected him in the second round, and he immediately embraced the city. “My personality,“ he says, “belongs in New York, D.C., Miami, Atlanta, Houston. But I was very happy. I wanted to go somewhere where they weren’t that good, and I wanted to be the reason for their success.“ The Bengals hadn’t had a winning record in eleven years or so much as appeared on Monday Night Football in nine.

By 2003, Johnson had become the conference’s leading receiver, one of the league’s most fined players (penalized $70,000 that season for various celebration-and wardrobe-related offenses), and its class clown. After scoring a touchdown in a mid-December home game against the San Francisco 49ers, he rooted in a snowbank and extricated from it a hand-lettered sign: DEAR NFL, PLEASE DON’T FINE ME AGAIN!!!!! The first of his prepared TD celebrations, it was an irresistible performance. Its success—fans flocked to buy his replica jersey, which became one of the league’s top five best-sellers, and Reebok signed him to an endorsement deal—proved instructive. Prior to the 2005 season, Chad Johnson told the AP, “This is the year of entertainment. I no longer play football.“

The Bengals made the playoffs in 2005 for the first time since 1990, and their wild-card game against Pittsburgh should have been Chad Johnson’s most glorious day on a football field. But the team lost a blowout, and Johnson played miserably, with only four receptions for fifty-nine yards and no TDs. Twenty-four hours later, ProFootballTalk.com broke a strange and ugly story: In the locker room at halftime, Johnson, while hooked up to an IV (he was cramping), had allegedly scuffled with his wide receivers coach and swung at his head coach. Bengals officials dismissed the report, and Johnson himself called it a hoax. The fullest account I’ve found suggests that Johnson, frustrated by his exclusion from the offense in the first half, had chased down those coaches with his IV still attached. “Is that what happened?“ I ask him.

There’s a lengthy, hostile silence. “Hell no,“ he finally says. I point out that this, for Chad Johnson, is an awfully short answer. He begins talking and quickly gathers speed: “I just wasn’t being utilized at all. I was very pissed. And I fussed about it the entire week, ’cause I knew what they were gonna do, and we had no answer for it. I prepared stupid hard, and I studied; I went to the coaches, and they had nothing. In the biggest game of our careers, you can’t get your best player the ball? The plan was not to utilize me. The plan was to allow them to do what they did to me and just use everyone else. I go back to that moment in Pittsburgh and they’re giving me an IV and I’m thinking about Santa Monica. You know how hard I worked to get to this point? That’s why I blew up like that.“

Was his behavior that day an error in judgment? After another unhappy pause, he at last murmurs, “I guess you could say that.“ But the issues that provoked the blowup didn’t go away. In 2006, the media suggested that Johnson, who didn’t score in the season’s last six games, had “disappeared.“ I ask him if that’s a fair statement.

“It’s the same thing every year. Hello! I’m here!’ You don’t let them take your best player away. San Diego doesn’t let another team say, We’re gonna stop L.T.’ New Orleans doesn’t let another team say, We’re gonna stop Reggie Bush.’ Carolina doesn’t let another team say, We’re gonna stop Steve Smith.’ Could you imagine me somewhere else with the mind-set that those coaches have? [New England’s Bill] Belichick? Could you imagine me with a Mike Martz, genius offensive coordinator [of the Detroit Lions]? I guarantee you I got my point across in the off-season. I’m just a player, I don’t want to get beside myself. But I’m not having it this year.“

In June, Chad Johnson raced a horse on foot and won a convincing upset victory in front of 8,000 fans. For once he’s not trashtalking: “Maybe that horse was having a bad day,“ he says. “I can still hear him coming. They make a noise when they’re breathing through their nose.“ He yawns. “Horses are fast.“ Giddy with victory, he then challenged Floyd Mayweather to box three rounds. “I’m looking forward to knocking Floyd out,“ he tells me companionably. He also challenged LeBron James to a one-on-one. (“How good a baller are you?“ I ask. His answer: “Good enough to beat LeBron.“) Both stunts, he says, are greenlighted for the coming off-season and will benefit Feed the Children.

“I will use the media to my advantage, to get my material out,“ Johnson tells me. Last year, in recognition of Hispanic Heritage Month, he announced, “My name isn’t Chad no more“ and demanded that the press refer to him henceforth as Ocho Cinco, for his uniform number, eighty-five. He adds, “But the media is not your friend. You’ve got to walk a straight line. Especially here in Cincinnati. You know how we got in trouble.“

He’s referring to the past fourteen months, during which ten of his teammates were busted in separate incidents on charges ranging from felony gun possession to grand theft to spousal battery. “Stuff gets blown out of proportion,“ Johnson says. I point out that trouble is finding not only Bengals but also high-profile players around the league: Pacman Jones, Michael Vick. “Is it as simple as Commissioner Goodell says?“ I ask Johnson. “ This is the world we live in?’ “

“God, there’s a microscope on your life,“ Johnson exclaims. “There’s no more privacy. You can’t do the things you did before you got here. You can’t. The media is killing Vick. I know he messed up, but everybody loved Vick the football player. Now that he’s in trouble, I ain’t heard anybody say anything good. Nothing! He shouldn’t have been doing it, but everybody’s not perfect. It’s bullshit, man. I love dogs to death, I don’t condone dog fighting, but they are killing the man in the media. Like murder! They doing him worse than O.J.; they doing him worse than Michael Jackson. It’s like they’re out to get him. Like, We got one!’ “

I want to talk to Johnson about NFL concussions; they’ve been a big story lately. Last year, he suffered a severe concussion after a brutal hit. His postgame interview is ten seconds of him squinting, swallowing hard, and slurring his speech, and then a Bengals publicist closes him down. He tells me he’s watched the video on YouTube.

“Were you freaked out by how dazed you were?“

“No,“ he says. “I was laughing.“

Research at the Center for the Study of Retired Athletes has strongly linked multiple concussions with various psychological and cognitive problems, including depression and early-onset Alzheimer’s; The New York Times has published heartbreaking case studies. “Have you been following the story?“ I ask. “I don’t think it’ll happen to me,“ he replies curtly. I observe that he seems uncomfortable with the question. “It’s football, man,“ he says with some irritation. “I’m not worried about that. I doubt that I’m just gonna continually get hit and hit and hit like that.“

At this moment, Johnson’s guest, a redheaded woman in a flowing white blouse, finally appears. She and Johnson awkwardly discuss whether or not she should return to Miami; apparently a plane leaves in an hour. “Can I stay? Can I leave tomorrow?“ she meekly asks. He doesn’t think it’s a good idea: “I have work in the morning,“ he says. After a minute or two of this, he asks her point-blank, “What do you wanna do?“ Grudgingly, she replies, “Go, right?“ “That’s on you!“ Johnson exclaims. He turns back to me, and a few minutes later, the woman does leave.

Johnson’s commitment to his work obliterates everything in his personal life. He has three children but says, “In a sense, I’m really not supposed to have kids. I put everything into football, dude, studying long hours. I’m ridiculous with it. I wish I could put that same energy into them. I just know that if it was the other way around, I wouldn’t be good. I put football first for the better of them, but their mom says, You’re missing valuable time that you won’t be able to get back, because they’re young.’ “

His hilariously intense outgoing voicemail message reiterates his dedication to his job: After a twenty-five-second “Freebird“ lead-in, Chad declares, “I know you’re trying to get in touch with me. Man, I’m so focused right now, man, I got a lot going on, man, just leave me a message, man, just bear with me, I’m gonna get back to you at some point in time, man. You gotta respect what I’m doing here, man. I love you to death.“

Lest his focus waver, Johnson plays mind games with himself. “Everywhere I go, I fill out job applications at restaurants,“ he says. “McDonald’s, Burger King, Red Lobster, Benihana’s. That could be reality, if I lose what makes Chad Johnson Chad Johnson.“ I gesture at his posh spread. “What would you have done with your life,“ I ask him, “if Coach Collins hadn’t told you you had a shot at the NFL?“

By now Chad Johnson has been holding forth in his darkened living room, in his lordly bathrobe, for nearly two hours. “I love the lifestyle that I live,“ he says. “I’m a flashy, flamboyant person. To have the means to get the type of things I like, I’d have to do stuff that I have no business doing.“ It’s a little frightening, I think, to imagine him devoting all that energy and intelligence to a life of crime. “I’m just being real with you,“ Chad Johnson says, and grins at me.

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